Do you have a link to your blog. I want to see what ya mean, as I haven't had the problem on my blog. Am wondering if it's theme-specific. Have you tried another theme to see if have same problem? Cuz that may help staff narrow down where the problem lies.

well, my blog is vollmer.nl, press any post to check what's wrong. also, the other topic/discussion was one filled with many options, including yours, but nothing helps. there's a bug i think, in when the visual editor interprets the text i entered and tries to clean up the code that is implemented when i insert text. (i.e. i insert enters to create space between paragraphs and the WP editor wrongfully deletes all those enters and reduces them to just one.

because of this, I and other people around me, put in a "." where a [p] break should occur, and colour it white...

Controlling the spacing between paragraphs when the browser renders them is one of the things that CSS is designed to do easily. It lets you do quite a bit more than that, but it is one of the things you can do with it.

The best way to do this consistently is to learn a bit about CSS and get the custom CSS upgrade, since you can then just set a class on the paragraphs and have the CSS set up to take care of it. Short of that, you can specify this on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis in the HTML view in the editor. Here's an example to play with:

I just did a quick test, and the visual editor doesn't drop anything from this example. So, you can do most of your work in the visual editor and just switch to the HTML to add/change/remove properties from the style attributes.

Short answer: The example I gave above works just by putting it into the HTML editor.

Slightly longer answer:

There are really two ways to do CSS: using style attributes and style sheets. The example above works by modifying the style attribute of a specific HTML element (which is why it can be done in the HTML editor). Style attributes are handy for a small change here or there. They only affect the specific element on which the style attribute is specified.

There are a couple of drawbacks to style attributes:

It's really hard to be consistent over a long period of time. If you want the same type of paragraph to be formatted the same way in your next 200 posts, you'll need to specify it the same way on every one of those paragraphs.

If you later decide to rework your site (changing the theme, for example), you may find that you have to go back through and change every one of those posts, in exactly the same way, in order to get things to look right. This might also cause people subscribed via RSS to get notified about these formatting changes.

There are a lot of changes that you simply can't make this way. For example, moving the sidebar of a theme from one side of the page to the other can't be done with style attributes.

Style sheets get around pretty much all of these issues, which is why the Custom CSS upgrade can be really useful.

It's a bit counterintuitive when you're not used to it, but it's actually how everything you see on the web works. HTML ignores whitespace, and the formatting is handled by the browser based on the CSS.

Most word processors (Word, OpenOffice Writer, etc.) let you define and work with styles. Personally, I find it odd when people hit return a couple of times to add space between paragraphs, which is a sort of "typewriter" mentality. It's kind of like buying a sports car and then hooking it up to the team of horses that pull your carriage in order to get around. :-)

I suspect WordPress is just trying to be "helpful" by getting rid of what it thinks are extraneous tags. I've had the same cornered feeling when a word-processor hijacks my syntax and word choice (I really dislike some of the autocorrect features).

Unfortunately, the current visual editor doesn't seem to give us the option to tell it "quit helping me, already!". I wish it did. So far as I can tell, the best solution here on wordpress.com is to get the Custom CSS upgrade, put in something like.spacepar {<br />
margin-top: 5px;<br />
}
And, when you're writing a post, jump into the HTML editor to make sure that the paragraph tags have a class attribute:<p class="spacepar">Like this one.</p>
That way, the formatting of all the paragraphs with that class will be consistent, and if you decide to change the spacing on them, you can just update the stylesheet in your dashboard.